Design by not knowing—Alt Group’s Dean Poole on why not having the answer leads to success

Eleven years ago four young men started a conversation that eventually led to the super power in
creativity that we know today as Alt Group. Having collected about a
gazillion awards since its inception (roughly speaking), Alt's creative director and co-founder
Dean Poole took the company's success another step further by snapping up the highly prestigious John Britten Black Pin award—for
an individual who has made a major contribution to design nationally and
internationally—at Friday’s Best Design Awards. So does winning this grandiose
award change anything? No—life is as crazy as always he says.

Awards aren’t everything, but they are something. “It means the idea that you’re communicating
is universal. We’re doing our job because the idea is cutting through and
communicating, which is what we get employed to do, says Poole.”

Aside from winning the
Black Pin award, Alt group also took home seven Gold Pins, in a
performance not too dissimilar to last years awards. You can add these recent
additions to the very impressive trail of awards left in Alt’s wake, which in
the last two years have included: Gold and Bronze at the Art Directors Club; Silver and Bronze and One Show Design in New York; winners in the Webby Awards; Silver and Gold at the Cannes Design Lions; Platinum and Gold in Graphis Design
Annual and numerous red dot awards. Exhausted yet?

Poole certainly isn’t. In
fact, he says he’s still got the energy and curiosity of a teenager. “We
feel like we’re still teenagers and we haven’t finished yet. There are so many
things that we want to do and fix up."

That’s an impressive
stance, when you consider Poole started exhibiting his artwork at the tender
age of 14. However he soon fell out of love with art and fell into design
instead.

“The great thing about
design is that it’s the social life of ideas. You get to see ideas out in the
wild rather than in a box and in a monitored, curated experience. Design is
also much more collaborative. With design, you’re serving other people’s
problems.”

But Poole is adamant that Alt will never do design for design’s sake. “We’re really an ideas
company. We work with the idea first and the execution second. We’re a multidisciplinary
company.”

It’s this multidisciplinary
approach that has played a key role in the company’s success, and while working across such a diverse
range of areas has its challenges, Poole says the history of design has always
been like this.

“(Design was) a series of
skills that then got applied to an opportunity. If you go back to the Bauhaus
movement, that’s actually what they did. So we’re just trying to recreate that
feeling where if you get a group of happy people and put them in a room with a
set of skills and get them to fight something—be it the way people sit on a
chair or helping people connect with a brand—inherently, that’s what designers
are good at. They’re good at connections.”

And when it comes to
connection, the company has managed to connect with a wide range of clients
over an equally wide range of outlets, including books and web. A clue to this
success lies partially in the company’s webiste,—or lack thereof. Try and find Alt
on the web and you come across not much more than a simple web page with contact
details—an intentional move says Poole.

“We don’t promote our work
online because we don’t want people to come with an image in mind, but more of
a problem or opportunity.”

It’s a strategy Poole says
has allowed the company to work with everyone from Karen Walker at one end to
New Zealand Trade an Enterprise at the other.

“None of those brands are
alike. They’re all different. If you start with an image first you end up
creating a house style, not communicating an idea.”

The key is in diversity. “We
work on big jobs and really small jobs, but we treat them the same way. For us
it’s the opportunity to do good design.”

The Print Counsel: awarded Gold at 2010 Best Design Awards

Another key to the company's success
lies in literally having no idea. “We’re generally quite a curious culture,”
says Poole. “We have this philosophy of design by not knowing. We actually don’t
know. We tell our clients we don’t actually have the answer. It’s the joy of
finding out.”

Clearly Alt’s philosophy is
working, with the company continuing to go from strength to strength. Not that
the company is interested in exploding the size of its operation—though
clearly it could.

Poole says Alt has always
had a dream that asks: “How can you have a global presence and still be in one
place?”

“It’s nice to keep the
scale that you want because the right scale creates the right activity. But you
don’t have to be all over the world to do that. You can do it from here,” he
says. “You can export creativity.”

He says Alt could be huge
but it doesn’t actually want to be. “It just wants to be small, nimble and do
good work for a long, long time.”

When it comes to the health
of the Kiwi design scene, Poole says that from where he sits, New Zealand is
doing pretty well.

“We’re a young, emerging
design culture and like any culture, that takes time. In recent years, there’s
been a new design culture emerging. You can see it happening in furniture with
the success of people like David Trubridge. You can see it happening in
architecture. People have said recently that we’re like the Scandinavia of the
South Pacific. Design is a powerful expression of culture. It’s not just about
good business. It also hints at who we are. Magazines and technology have
exposed people to what New Zealand has to offer and I think people are finding
a unique voice.”

Karen Walker: awarded Silver at 2010 Best Design Awards

Having worked in so many
areas, is there one area in particular outlet Alt would really like to sink its
teeth into? “We kinda like film...we would love to do something in an
entertainment space – it’s a different narrative — a different way of communicating,”
says Poole.

With a career that has
included everything from fine arts, to sculpturing, to brand identity, is there
anything the Black Pin winner can’t do?

“I can’t cook, I’m really
hopeless.” Poole explains that he has a friend who tells him that every
designer should be able to cook because cooking and design are the same. It’s a
series of ingredients that you need to put together in a unique way and then
you serve up something that is an experience that everyone enjoys—so his friend
says. Poole’s response? ”I’m only good at toast.”

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